Awkward. The New Jersey election campaign between Gov. Chris Christie and rival state Sen. Barbara Buono just went there. He says she mocked his weight with a remark about him “frolicking on the beach,” but she says there’s no such undertone to her campaign rhetoric.

In a case that some see as a complex double standard surrounding the N-word, a federal jury awarded $30,000 in punitive damages Tuesday after finding that a black manager’s four-minute rant was hostile and discriminatory. The jury awarded $250,000 in compensatory damages.

During the first weekend of Mississippi’s alligator season a hunting party from Madison held the weight record for an alligator taken in the state. But the record only lasted about an hour before a second gator beat it.

President Barack Obama won House Speaker John Boehner’s backing for a punitive strike against Syria on Tuesday, and senior Cabinet officials worked to convince Congress that Bashar Assad’s government must be punished for a suspected chemical weapons attack.

There was little fanfare, but the gleaming white and newly built $6.4-billion eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened to the public as vehicles began crossing it after more than a decade of construction delays.

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman landed Tuesday in North Korea and said he plans to hang out with authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un, have a good time and maybe bridge some cultural gaps — but not be a diplomat.

Microsoft Corp. is buying Nokia Corp.’s line-up of smartphones and a portfolio of patents and services in an attempt to strengthen its fight with Apple Inc. and Google Inc. and capture a slice of the lucrative mobile computing market.